Illustrator and Photoshop Colorful Balls Text Effect for the holidays or any time

by Ainsley Bevis

Just in time for the holidays, our friend Ainsley Bevis from BloomWebDesign.net sendis this great Adobe Illustrator tutorial! Now, you can run like this, or modify the color scheme for perfect holiday decoriations! She covers a number of good techniques good for beginner to intermediate Illustrator users, and then takes you all into Adobe Photoshop for the finishing touches. Ainsley writes . . .

In this tutorial I’ll teach you how to create a Colorful Balls Text Effect/Typography Poster using Adobe Illustrator to create the text, and Photoshop to add some finishing touches. We’ll be going through some basic Illustrator & Photoshop methods to create this fun & colorful text effect.

Final Result at right

Illustrator

1. Create a new document that’s 600×300 pixels. Using a thick/bold font, write out your letters in black. Lock the letter’s layer and create a new layer.

2. Using the Ellipse Tool draw a circle while holding down the shift key (to keep the shape perfect). Duplicate the circle 3 times by dragging the circle away while holding down the ALT Key. On each circle put on a different colored gradient like below.

3. Draw a smaller circle with the Ellipse Tool again and put in the gradient below. This will create a nice light glare on the ball.

4. Duplicate the light glare and place it on the other circles.

5. Next select each ball with the light glare and click on the Merge button in Pathfinder to merge the 2 shapes together.

6. Now comes the most time consuming part! Select each of the balls and duplicate them over the letters, changing the size of them by selecting the balls with the Selection Tool and dragging a corner down or up while holding down the shift key. If you want to rotate them so the light glare is in a different direction, select them with the Selection Tool and rotate a corner.

Do this with all the colored balls until the black letters are hidden. lots of sizes, lots of variety!

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